How ICE enforcement tactics have changed under Trump

They're the to the highest degree seeable symbolisation of what U.S. Chairman Donald ruff pledges will be "the largest mass deportation in history."

They're the armed officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), often masked and unidentified, wearing plain clothes under protective vests, arresting people in towns and cities across the country. 

ICE made roughly three times as many arrests from May through July compared with the same period last year, according to the latest government figures obtained through a Freedom of Information request by the Deportation Data Project, led by the University of California Berkeley School of Law.

But those same figures do not show a comparable increase in the number of people with a criminal history getting picked up by ICE. Roughly half of the 61,000 people currently held in immigration detention in the U.S. Have neither a criminal record nor face a criminal charge, according to the data. 

The evidence belies the Trump administration's claim that its immigration crackdown is targeting "the worst of the worst," said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, policy analyst and attorney at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Bush-Joseph says the statistics reflect the tactics ICE officers are using to dramatically ramp up their arrest numbers under direction from the White House.

The data shows immigration arrests nationwide averaged roughly 300 per day throughout 2024. Following Trump's inauguration in January, arrests doubled almost overnight to roughly 600 per day, then spiked again in May, reaching more than 1,000 per day in June. 

Critics have slammed the Trump administration for ICE's tactics of randomly apprehending non-white men, particularly Latinos, in sweeps where undocumented migrants live or work. 

A decision by the U.S. Supreme Court this week endorsed such tactics — at least for now. 

In a 6-3 decision, the court's conservative majority lifted a California judge's order that had temporarily banned agents from stopping people solely based on their race, language, job or location.

U.S. Supreme Court rules federal agents can conduct raids in Los Angeles

But the Supreme Court's decision is not the final word on the case.

The courts have yet to hear full arguments about whether the tactics violate the U.S. Constitution's protections against unreasonable arrest. A hearing is scheduled for Sept. 24 in a district court in California, and the case is widely expected to end up in the Supreme Court's hands in the coming months.

Mike Fox, a legal fellow with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington, says ICE is using unconstitutional methods to ramp up the number of migrants it's arresting. 

"The numbers are going to be a lot lower if you're actually focusing on the violent people that you should be focusing on," said Fox. "It's a lot easier to just stand outside a Home Depot and round people up." 

Fox says he believes most Americans want ICE to target violent offenders for deportation, not "someone who came here for a better life… trying to make an honest living."

The Trump administration insists its approach is working. 

"As a result of this unprecedented effort, scores of gang members and national security threats have been taken off our streets," said a White House news release on Tuesday.

During a White House briefing on Tuesday, when a reporter asked about American citizens' concerns that they could be swept up in the immigration enforcement, Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt brushed off the question. 

"They should not be concerned because this administration is focused on the detention and deportation of illegal alien criminals who broke our nation's immigration laws," she said. 

"When ICE goes out to conduct a targeted operation to deport illegal criminals from our community, they are doing so with intelligence… in most cases with the backing of local law enforcement who know exactly where these illegal alien criminals and drug traffickers and drug dealers are hiding in plain sight." 

While the White House likes to highlight examples of violent criminals picked up by ICE and trumpet the drop in illegal crossings of the border with Mexico, reaching its reported goal of deporting one million migrants per year appears impossible without going after people who have no criminal history. 

According to ICE's own figures, made public in a letter to a congressman last September, the agency was tracking about 425,000 immigrants with criminal convictions who were not in detention and another 222,000 with pending criminal charges. (Roughly 20 per cent of the combined total was convicted or charged with traffic offences.)

Even if every one of those immigrants with convictions or charges is detained and deported within a year, that leaves the administration some 350,000 short of the target. 

"As immigration enforcement increases, the per cent of those arrested who are convicted of a crime decreases," said the Immigration Research Initiative, a non-profit, non-partisan think-tank funded by the NEO Foundation charity, in its analysis of data from the first six months following Trump's inauguration.

Another non-partisan, non-profit organization found the administration ramped up its volume of immigration-related arrests in an "indiscriminate and unfocused" way. 

"The Trump administration's scattershot approach to enforcement is simultaneously targeting longtime residents, those with no criminal records, undocumented families, migrant children, undocumented workers, and random people," said the American Immigration Council, in a report published in late July.

Senior reporter

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